Carney’s dime-store realpolitik makes Canadians feel good—but that’s not enough

The historian Perry Anderson once remarked of Vladimir Putin that for many Russians, it was an enormous relief simply to hear a leader addressing them in their language with clarity and fluency, and this contributed significantly to his political authority. When Mark Carney spoke at the World Economic Forum recently, it came after a full decade of Justin Trudeau’s leadership by Instagram, prompting a similar sense of relief. This surely contributed to the plaudits. But it has received much acclaim outside of Canada as well—this isn’t just national pride at work but something broader and deeper. Some of it is longstanding resentment at the United States; some of it is more recent disgust with Donald Trump’s obnoxiousness. And frankly, some of it is that it comes at what is perhaps the lowest point for political rhetoric generally in at least 500 years. Thus, the surfeit of praise that greeted the speech has a drop-of-water-in-a-drought feel to it. So impressed were its audience at the references to Thucydides and Vaclav Havel that they paid insufficient attention to the essential hollowness of the speech itself. For, it pretended to an ethos of political realism without the substance.1The fact that the statement was delivered at Davos—itself a simulacrum of a real geopolitical congress—speaks volumes. This is a case of wanting to eat one’s cake and have it too: Carney offers a seemingly sophisticated critique of the globalist rhetoric that has prevailed among his class (and certainly at venues like Davos) for years, while remaining committed to the substance of globalism. Ironically, Trump’s response, boorish as it was, reflects truer realism: deeds—and the ability to execute them—matter more than words. That Trump’s prior provocations were the impetus for Carney’s speech is true enough, but “So’s your mother” isn’t a geostrategy. This is not to excuse Trump’s (and by extension America’s) complicity in the breakdown of relations, but at the end of the day, the president, who turns 80 this year, is riding out his final term, very potentially without a legislative majority. Countries have long lives, and they outlive even the most consequential leaders. And while Trump has proven a canny interpreter of popular passions, particularly on issues like immigration, many of his strongest concerns are idiosyncratic to say the least: the romantic obsession with Greenland, irritation with Canadian trade deals, a general affection for tariffs. All of these, not incidentally, have been primary factors in the present disruptions in the U.S.-Canada relationship. Actual realism would weigh these factors in the balance rather than proclaim the demise of an entire world order due to some overheated rhetoric and foolish economic moves that world markets have generally managed to price in without difficulty. And certainly, actual realism would have to consider the real distribution of material capabilities. The aggregated weight of all the “middle powers” does not actually amount to very much against the hegemon. Yet Carney wants to declare openly what amounts to a strategy of balancing with a coalition that doesn’t come close to real equilibrium with the superpower in material terms, presumably while not facing worse than the tariffs and rude language they’ve already dealt with. The instant Metternichians who are now coolly ascribing Canada’s turn against its longstanding security arrangement to sober risk calculation may want to think this through. For, there is little evidence that anyone has thought through the real implications of a world where “the strong do as they will”—per Carney’s riff on Thucydides. The flexible strategy being proposed still relies upon a matrix of possibilities that is itself predetermined by the status quo—one that is underwritten by U.S. hegemony. But it is that same status quo that is being thrown into question by proclamations of a “new world order.” By the same token, and without even discussing their political and moral significance, all of the deals with China and Qatar and whoever else comprise but a fraction of the country’s ongoing trade with the U.S. Meanwhile, the relations with both raise a variety of concerns around political interference. There is little evidence that the country’s law enforcement and national security services are remotely equipped to manage the kinds of intelligence risks involved. And given that the PRC government is already known to use threats against family members residing in mainland China to apply political pressure on Chinese-Canadians, how much more exposed will they be as a result of policies like this one? One could go on, but these are just a few examples of the wider geopolitical complications that these “diversified trade” negotiations open up, and there is virtually no indication that these are recognized by either the present government or the wider establishment that labours mightily to shore up domestic consensus around it. There are two larger problems here. The first is practical: Carney consistently proceeds as though the last 10 years never happened, and that Canada’s material situation were other than it is. It is still operating from a position of years of low growth, interprovincial trade barriers still in place, plans to utilize strategic resources still in limbo, and so on.2This is, after all, a country whose troops had to provide their own gear in a combat zone, and that still spends more on Indigenous priorities than military ones. But the larger issue is political—and perhaps even moral. This is a country that has spent some years accusing itself of genocide and decrying its colonial history.3Canada’s own ministry of defence put out a lengthy report a couple years ago that included the following sentence: “Racism in Canada is not a glitch in the system; it is the system. Colonialism and intersecting systems such as patriarchy, heteronormativity and ableism constitute the root causes of inequality within Canada.” The rejection of both Trump’s aggrandizement and the existing structure of international institutions requires Carney to fall back on Canadian nationalism—the same one the country’s elites have spent many years denouncing. It cannot be said that history’s Author lacks a sense of irony. For, the new champion of the Canadian homeland is a figure who was educated in the U.S. and Great Britain, derives most of his wealth from a U.S.-incorporated asset manager, owes much of his stature to his former position with a foreign central bank, and who until last year held citizenship with two other countries besides Canada. Carney is not just another cosmopolitan elite—he is elite cosmopolitanism incarnate. A genuine realism would take an honest look at Canada’s material (and materiel) situation relative to the global distribution of power. And a genuine nationalism would draw on spiritual resources of pride, rather than shame, and finally place the interests of the population at large over those of the cartelized sectors of the country’s political economy. That neither of these has yet come to pass, and that Carney is nonetheless enjoying such fulsome public praise, raises a final question: does Canada really understand what game it’s playing?